Our next giant leap will need private backing

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Spacecraft branded like racing cars, reality TV from the Moon? The next 40 years in space will be very different from the last

Until the 1950s space travel was a futuristic concept, familiar from H. G. Wells and Jules Verne — and from comics and cornflake packets. But Sputnik, followed by Yuri Gagarin’s (and John Glenn’s) circling of the Earth made it real. The advent of the space age crystallised into reality human fantasies that dated back centuries.

The Moon landings came less than 70 years after the first powered flight — Orville Wright’s “brief hop” at Kitty Hawk — and only 12 years after the launch of Sputnik. Had the space race sustained its momentum, one might by now have expected a